Someone did drill a hole through the wall of the Space Station, commander reveals
Is a saboteur really running amok on the International Space Station – and using a drill to create tiny holes in the wall of the Russian section?
It sounds utterly bizarre, but the idea circulated in Russian media after a 2mm hole was found in the wall of the Space Station.
Mission commander Alexander Gerst said this week that someone DID drill a hole in the Space Station – but he believes it wasn’t a saboteur.
Instead, Gerst suggested, the hole may have been the product of a botched repair on Earth.
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Gerst told Radio 4’s Today programme, ‘It’s still pretty obvious that it was a man made hole. The hole was there and it was just covered by a little glue, so the question is how did it get there?’
‘It was pretty clear in my opinion not the crew that sprung the leak. That was just a few misunderstandings they had out there.
Gerst said that the hole did not pose a threat to the space station astronauts, but said, ‘As an astronaut you think ‘Well, what would have happened if it broke loose a little bit earlier, when we were travelling to the space station, when you only have a very small volume of air in that spacecraft?
‘Even though the hole was small in that case it would have been more more severe for us.’
Last month, cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Sergei Prokopyev performed a space walk to investigate the hole.
The cosmonauts walked 100 feet along the space station, removed an insulation panel using a knife, and examined the 2mm hole.
From the exterior, the cosmonauts said, there appeared to be no drill holes, unlike on the inside.
Previously, wild and unsubstantiated rumours had circulated in Russian media that the hole had been drilled by a NASA astronaut – possibly because he was homesick and wished to return to Earth.
